A Framework for Monitoring and Security Authentication in Cloud based on Eucalyptus Zefeng Gao Xiaoyong Li School of Computer Science & Technology Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing, China gao_ze_feng@163.com Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications Beijing, China lxyxjtu@163.com Abstract—Since the cloud computing was proposed, the research of cloud instantaneously swept the world and all kinds of cloud products have appeared in public eyes. But if the cloud platform security is not guaranteed, companies or individuals will not run and store their own data in the cloud, especially since the Hollywood nude-picture scandal event put the cloud computing to the point of a struggle. So how to put these cloud product promotion out and make interest to the company becomes the company's biggest problem, and the credible cloud’s service has become an urgency to implement. In this paper, we are concerned with trust in the cloud computing. Paper mainly launches the discussion from the application layer and infrastructure layer. The monitoring system collects data from cloud system real time, and makes the corresponding judgment according to the analysis results. At the same time, the system will report the data to the third party to record and modify the system rules timely. By these means, the cloud system can improve the stability of the service and make it more credible. Index Terms—Cloud Computing, Eucalyptus, KVM, XEN. I. INTRODUCTION On September 1, 2014, foreign hackers used the disk system vulnerabilities of iCloud to steal the Hollywood actress nude photos and release in the network by BBS, it was the Hollywood nude-picture scandal event that shocked all over the world last year. With the popularity of smartphones and the cloud computing, the cloud services[1] bring great convenience to the people, which allow people to share pictures, video, documents, applications, and other important data by the crossplatform in real time, however, if the cloud account is stolen, their data will also lose and may cause huge losses. Apple Inc. note that hackers did not directly intrude into the storage service system of iCloud, but the invasion of actress personal accounts from the terminal. Whether it is ICloud service system problem or account theft problem, the question caused by this matter is worth to think about whether or not the cloud service is safe [2]. There are a variety of cloud advertisement on the Internet now, advocating how good their cloud platform is, to let users rest assured to buy and use their service, but I think we should have a seriously reconsider before buy. The trusted cloud computing is to provide people with the cloud platform management services that can be trusted and ensure their data safe, and it bases on virtualization, that aims to make full use of the resource and service providing by the infrastructure provider. Cloud computing can be divided into three levels of service: infrastructure as a service (IAAS), platform as a service (PAAS) and software as a service (SAAS). At present there are a lot of products to solve how to implement the cloud platform, but no perfect answer to protect a cloud platform safer. The potential dangerous [3] of cloud security is one of the key elements of cloud services that can be accepted by the user and is also one of the main obstacle of the application of cloud computing. In addition to the possibility of large scale computing resources system failure, there is much hidden danger of cloud computing, for example, lack of unified standards of the applicable laws and regulations as well as the protection of user’s privacy [4], data sovereignty, migration, transmission, safety and disaster preparedness, etc. In terms of data privacy protection, anyone that needs the information that is stored in our computer must be authorized, and it breaks the law if hackers intrude into our computer illegally. However, when a user’s information stored in the cloud, there is no clear law that prevent the cloud service provider and other official bodies to view our data and what kind of punishment will be happen to provider or other official bodies because of the leakage of privacy. This paper proposed a framework for monitoring and security authentication in Cloud based on Eucalyptus. We are mainly concerned with protection of data privacy and detection of potentially hazardous and dangerous from the application layer and infrastructure layer. II. RELATED WORK Eucalyptus [6] is an open source software infrastructure to realize cloud platform with practical cloud computing cluster or cluster of workstation, it was proposed by a research project of the University of California School of computer science at Santa Barbara. Eucalyptus cloud contains 4 components: walrus, CLC, CC and NC. CLC is the controller component that is mainly responsible for the management of the whole system in the Eucalyptus clouds. It is the main entrance to enter the Eucalyptus cloud for all users and the administrators. The ICSPCC2015 978-1-4799-8920-1/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE This work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (61370069), Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (132032) and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-12-0794). Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. controller component CC is responsible for the management of the whole virtual network in Eucalyptus. CC maintains all information about Node Controller running in the system, and is responsible for the control of life cycle of NC. The requests based on SOAP or REST interface are sent to CC and CC route the request to the NC that has available resources. NC controls the host operating system and the hypervisor. SC implements of the S3 interface of Amazon as the storage service in the Eucalyptus. The joint with SC and Walrus uses to store the virtual machine image, the kernel image and RAM disk image and the user data. In Eucalyptus systems, there are some remote login sessions and data that need to transfer between server and client, and SSH is the way to ensure session secure. The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol [7] has been a popular tool since it was proposed in 1995, which provides mutual authentication, encryption, and message integrity. It is mainly used as a secure remote shell to access files (SCP and SFTP) and establishes tunnels for other application layer protocols. On the client perspective, SSH provides two levels of security verification: Security authentication based on password and based on security keys. Eucalyptus was proposed to make full use of the system resources, and the virtualization technology is a major means to achieve the goal. Virtualization [8] is a technique that computer components run in a VM but not the real machine. Virtualization technology can make a single CPU simulation of multi CPU parallel and allow a platform to run multiple operating systems at the same time, and the application can run without mutual influence in the independent space, thereby it can significantly improve the working efficiency of computer. XEN[9] and KVM[10] are the famous Virtualization technology applying for the Linux. III. THE FRAMEWORK DESIGNING Because Eucalyptus is the open source project, we can accord to our own needs to add or remove some function, and Linux has relatively higher security performance, so we choose Linux and Eucalyptus as the research object to achieve a cloud computing platform. In this paper, we mainly study cloud security from two aspects: the application layer and the infrastructure layer. First of all, we assume that there is a third party that is credible, such as national department, etc. In addition, my paper mainly focuses on the design of framework, so the methods that check the legitimacy of operations will not be detailed elaborated. Fig 1 is the model of certification system of third party. First, certification center verify the service provider’s identity, if verification passed, he would submit data to the certification center and check them legitimacy according to the strategy, if unusual data is discovered, system will immediately notify service consumers to let them verify the validity and carry on corresponding processing. The system certification strategy of third party is a learning process, it is only the basic legal verification at the beginning, if there is a new condition and confirm it legal, it will join into authentication strategy, and if finding some action illegal, it will directly join the blacklist, which speeds up the legitimacy certification and correcting the mistakes, but for some ambiguous operation, it must be checked according to the legal process step by step. Because the third party is not in the same LAN with the Eucalyptus System, so we must ensure session safe. Secure shell protocol (SSH) is a protocol that provides secure remote login and other secure network services in unsafe network. The way based on key security verification needs to rely on the key. So we have to create a pair of keys for ourselves, and put public key to the server that you will access to. If you want to connect to the SSH server, client software would request to the server with your key for security verification. If server receives the request, it will look for your public key in the server's home directory, and then compare it with the key you just send. If two keys are consistent, the server will encrypt challenge with the public key and send it to the client. After client software receives it, you can use your private key to decrypt and then sends it to the server. OAuth2.0 is also a protocol that allows the user to let third party applications access to the private resources that the user is stored in a site. Fig.1 Operation Audit Center Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Draw lessons from with these security modes, we can register the server to the third party with public key and accord to the above schema to validate. So it must be verified before the connection between the server and the third party. If verification is not successful, certification system will send a message to the corresponding infrastructure provider and notify the service consumers at the same time. This will avoid the middlemen attacking the system and ensure data security. Because not in the same LAN, there are some data that needs to transfer between the user terminal and the servers, so we must have a means to ensure the data safe. The digital abstract algorithm and encryption are often used to ensure the security of data in the network, so we can draw lessons from these methods and use this way to validate resource of the system. In Linux, file is the only way of equipment existence. The information that is monitored differs depending on the type of the configuration entry. For standard files, the file content is monitored; for folders is the folder listing; for commands is the output of the command execution as well as the code of the commands themselves. The information is recorded in the way with digital abstract and the encryption, and uploaded to the third party at the same time. The system compare these files with records in a regular interval, if abnormal, report to the third party and check them according to the process, especially like the operations that files are modified frequently. We could group these operations according to the weight, which bases on the damage to the system and the operation that has the greater weight has the higher priority of alarm. It is conducive to find and handle problems in a timely manner. Hollywood event was triggered because of not noticing the problem timely. At the same time, we must ensure the legitimacy of the client’s operations, so we should add a monitoring module in the system. In Eucalyptus, CLC is the only interface that the client enters the cloud, and provides the logical decision for cloud, it controls execution of client authentication service and turn the client's request to the task. We learn that the CLC node is the center of Eucalyptus from above description, so we can add a monitoring module in CLC node to record the operation of the system with the form of array:{file operation, operation type, operation time, operation user}.System encrypt these data and send them to the authentication center to save. Certification center regularly checks these operations, and if finding things abnormal, system will immediately sent text messages to the service consumer and mark this record. Every once in a while, such as a month or less, the certification center should check the whole system, if it is qualified, the earliest log of the lawful operation will be removed. In the Eucalyptus, the infrastructure providers are the special body and may bypass the Eucalyptus and directly access to the physical host data, or pass the Eucalyptus loophole to directly access to the cloud customer's VM and use the network sniffers method to steal and modify the data. Because they can directly access to the hardware, infrastructure providers can install malicious hardware and mount attacks on the system. To eliminate the danger like above, we use XEN as the example to discuss. For Eucalyptus system using XEN for virtualization, it uses the mixed mode and set up a privileged Domain (Domain0) that is used to manager other XEN management Domain and provides a virtual resource service. Domain0 contains a real device drivers that can directly access to the physical hardware and is responsible to interact with API that XEN provides, it also manage XEN virtual machine environment through management tools of the user mode. So we can consider Domain0 as the management center of this physical machine, and install a monitoring module on Domain0 that is responsible for monitoring infrastructure providers, if an unidentified operation is noticed, it will notify the third party and service consumers at the same time and infrastructure providers must explain it operation to verify the legitimacy. Fig.2 The Framework for Monitoring and Security Authentication Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. At the same time, the infrastructure providers may modify the boot-loader. Once a malicious program is booted, it will do great damage to the system, but it is not easy to find. In order to solve this problem, we suggest server developers to add one hardware record module to record the encrypted content of boot-loader. It is the first job that checks the correctness of the boot-loader after the server is powered up. If find the bootloader modified, the server will not powered up normally. In the above, we mainly introduce the Framework for Monitoring and Security Authentication from two aspects. We achieve the software solution in application layer, but the hardware solution in physical layer is not because of the specific characteristics. Fig 2 is the model of the Framework discussing in the above. IV. THE FRAMEWORK EVALUATION In order to validate the feasibility and validity of the cloud computing security verification framework, we judge it from two aspects, first of all, it has the following characteristics: z In the application layer, it can detect the user operation type to test whether it is the cross-border operation, the framework also can verify whether it is legitimate users and intercept unreliable operation. z In the service layer, it can detect the general operation of infrastructure providers and verify the legality. z By adding some functional hardware, the framework prevent service provider to steal the user’s data. z The validation framework also has the ability of selflearning. If some operations are determined as the legitimate operations, these operation would be added to the white list and not verified any more. In addition to the above features, we also select one physical machine that has been monitored with the security authentication and allocated the task, which aim to validate it feasibility by testing the usage of CPU, Memory and so on(mainly testing the aspect of software verification, because hardware requires server manufacturers to provide some support). There are two screenshots from our monitor system. Fig.3 is one hour statistical chart of CPU, record is the average value of every minute, x is the time and y is the CPU usage. Fig.4 is one hour statistical chart of memory, x is the time and y is the memory usage. From the screenshots, we can reach the following conclusions: in the period of task handling, the usages of CPU and Memory are still both relatively stable and have a difference of about thirty percent between lower and upper, and they are also under the seventy percent and have a reasonable state. From the conclusions above, we can learn that this framework not only does not influent performance so much, but also it can protect the system from threat. So the framework is feasible and could be applied to the Eucalyptus system. Fig.3 CPU Usage V. CONCLUSIONS This paper presents the safety monitoring scheme based on cloud services of Eucalyptus, aiming to improve the quality and meet the needs of users with high quality and safety. We mainly discuss the solutions from the service layer and the infrastructure layer, which ensure the system security by monitoring system files and boot loader and judging the operation by the authentication strategy of self-learning. At the same time, we are further researching on cloud monitor scheme to defend the outside intrusion. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (61370069), Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (132032) and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-12-0794). Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Atilim Universitesi. Downloaded on January 21,2022 at 18:09:12 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply. Fig.4 Memory Usage REFERENCES [1] Kalagiakos,P. ,“Cloud Computing learning,” Application of Information and Communication Technologies (AICT), 2011,pp.1-4 [2] Ryan K L Ko. “TrustCloud: A Framework for Accountability and Trust in Cloud Computing.” IEEE World Congress on Services,2011,pp.584-588 [3] Khalasi Gaurangkumar. “To Achieve Trust In The Cloud”. 2012 Second International Conference on Advanced Computing & Communication Technologies. 2012,pp.16-19 [4] S. Pearson and A. Charlesworth, "Accountability as a way forward for privacy protection in the cloud," Cloud Computing, 2009, pp. 131-144 [5] S. 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